Stunt Rock (1978)

          Delivering in a big way on both elements of its title, Stunt Rock is an Australian oddity depicting the adventures of an Aussie stuntman who visits the U.S. and hangs out with members of a flamboyant rock band, so the nearly plotless flick combines wild stunt footage with extensive concert sequences. As the cult-cinema equivalent of background noise, Stunt Rock is palatable because leading man Grant Page does lots of outrageously dangerous things, from climbing the sides of buildings to driving at insane speeds to setting himself on fire, and also because the gimmick of rock band Sorcery is that each of their shows features an onstage battle between good and evil wizards—lots of silly costumes, lots of magic tricks, lots of pyro. The movie also goes heavy into that oh-so-’70s gimmick of split-screen imagery. While I can’t say Stunt Rock held my attention particularly well as an adult viewer, I can’t help but imagine how an American version of the same movie would have blown my preadolescent mind—the notion of Evel Knievel costarring with Kiss sounds indescribably awesome (even though the actual movies Knievel and Kiss made in the ‘70s were indescribably awful). Setting aside enticing “what if” scenarios, Stunt Rock is sufficiently unique to merit attention from the cinematically adventurous. It’s not a good movie by any measure, but it stands alone.
          Page, already a veteran stuntman and TV personality by the time he made this picture, stars as a fictionalized version of himself. The premise is that he travels to America for work on an action-oriented TV show, then spends time with Sorcery since he’s related to one of the band’s members. That’s virtually the entire storyline of Stunt Rock, excepting Page’s interaction with the actress starring in the TV show—frustrated that her most exciting scenes feature stunt doubles, she pressures Page to train her in the art of doing dangerous things safely. To state the obvious, viewers already interested in movie stunts will find that aspect of the movie more compelling than others; unlike the same era’s Hooper (1978) and The Stunt Man (1980), this flick lets stunt footage unfurl without the burden of narrative import, so the vibe is very much ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Similarly, fans of Alice Cooper and Kiss are more likely than others to groove on what Sorcery throws down. The band’s heavy-metal tunes are melodic, but their onstage shtick is goofy. That said, some details in Stunt Rock are memorably weird, for instance the fact that Sorcery’s keyboard player never appears without a mask covering his entire head. What’s more, reading about the making of Stunt Rock reveals that director Brian Trenchard-Smith put the whole thing together—from concept to finished product—in six months, so that explains a lot. At least the Stunt Rock team found time to assemble a spectacular poster—why that key art failed to draw kids into theaters is a mystery.

Stunt Rock: FUNKY

Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws (1978)

          Here’s a peculiar one. About one-third of Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws is exactly what viewers might expect, a shameless riff on a certain Burt Reynolds blockbuster. There’s even a subplot about a woman running from the son of a vulgar sheriff. Yet the other two-thirds of Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws comprise an inept but sincere music-industry saga told from the perspective of someone with real-world experience. Jesse Lee Turner—the executive producer, cowriter, and star of this flick—enjoyed a minor novelty hit with the 1959 song “Little Space Girl” before his recording career sputtered. Presumably the goal of this enterprise was to get things going again, so the film features Turner performing several original songs.
          The picture opens in a tiny Texas town where ne’er-do-wells J.D. (Turner) and the Salt Flat Kid (Dennis Fimple) dream of showbiz success. J.D. is a singer-songwriter while the Kid is both J.D.’s accompanist and a ventriloquist. In jail after a bar brawl, the guys meet a fellow inmate who claims to be a music manager. Before he skips town, the “manager” scams cash from the guys and offers a business card they believe is their ticket to success. Off to Music City they go. Along the way they meet two ladies, one of whom is being pursued by Sheriff Leddy (Slim Pickens). The movie makes quick work of the ensuing Burt Reynolds-style high jinks before devoting much more screen time to the rigors of pursuing fame in Nashville. The guys hook up with a real manger, albeit a sketchy one, and they find allies in empathetic locals. Inevitably, the story climaxes with a make-or-break concert.
          Even though Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws is amateurish, the story is coherent, the leading actors are as enthusiastic as their characters, and the content is more or less family-friendly. In other words, the picture is wholly innocuous—except for some iffy flourishes. We’re talking a chase scene featuring “The William Tell Overture,” a major subplot (the girls and the sheriff) that completely disappears, and the truly bizarre spectacle of J.D.’s stage persona. While singing, Turner crouches and gyrates and twists as if he’s being electrocuted. Naturally, on-camera audiences pretend to be driven wild by his antics. Yet Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws—which has also been exhibited as Smokey and the Outlaw Women and J.D. and the Salt Flat Kid—is more of a curiosity than anything else inasmuch as it documents a stage in Turner’s odd trajectory. At some point after the movie faded from view, he shifted from entertainment to evangelism, though he eventually blended his interests by recording Christian albums. More recently, Turner has proselytized for the MAGA movement. 

Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws: FUNKY

The Music Lovers (1970)

          Relative to British director Ken Russell’s many other biopics about troubled artists, The Music Lovers falls somewhere between the grounded darkness of Savage Messiah (1972) and the vulgar excess of Mahler (1974)—never mind the deranged Lisztomania (1975), which exists in a universe all its own. Offering a florid take on the life of Russian composer Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers has several long passages that are both lyrical and rational, cleverly dramatizing the way artists use their work to speak to the people in their lives as well as to society in general. But then, as happens with depressing frequency throughout Russell’s career, the director’s lower instincts take control, dragging The Music Lovers into psychosexual ugliness.

          Set in Russia during the second half of the 19th century, The Music Lovers tracks Tchaikovsky (Richard Chamberlain) over many years. At the beginning of the picture, he works as a music teacher while periodically performing original compositions that only a few people appreciate, so in one early sequence, Russell places significant characters in the audience of a recital, then uses insert scenes to depict how each person reacts to Tchaikovsky’s melodies. Eventually, key relationships take shape. Tchaikovsky marries a fan, the emotionally unstable Antonia (Glenda Jackson), even though he’s gay. Concurrently, the wealthy Nadezhda (Izabella Telezynksa) becomes Tchaikovsky’s patron on the condition they never meet. Predictably, these dynamics prove untenable. As Antonia descends into insanity, Tchaikovsky’s refusal to sleep with her becomes a wedge in their combative relationship. Meanwhile, Nadezhda suffers from unrequited love, lusting for the man whom she financially supports but from whom she remains distant. It’s all very twisted, the situation made even more fraught by Tchaikovsky’s conflicted feelings about his sexuality, by the danger to his status if his gay liaisons become public knowledge, and by trauma originating with his mother’s death from cholera.

          Some scenes in The Music Lovers are so lovely that it’s a shame Russell couldn’t control his impulses—a sequence of people dressed in white as they dance among birch trees in a snowy forest is mesmerizing, and it’s not the only passage with real visual splendor. During the film’s best moments, Russell creates shots that time perfectly with Tchaikovsky’s music, thus conjuring an intoxicating form of heightened reality. And then he goes wild. In one of the film’s crudest moments, a feverish Antonia offers herself to Tchaikovsky while they ride on a rocking train, so Russell cuts back and forth between closeups of Jackson’s nether regions and reaction shots of Chamberlain looking close to nausea. It’s a degrading moment for everyone involved, not least the audience. Jackson easily steals the picture with her unbridled performance, though her powerful work reveals, by comparison, the limitations in Chamberlain’s stilted acting. In a way, that contrast epitomizes the problem with The Music Lovers—the movie periodically loses Tchaikovsky because of the lurid focus on the troubled women in his life.

The Music Lovers: FUNKY

Marco (1973)

Another failed attempt at extending their success to the big screen, musical fantasy Marco was produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr., beloved for their stop-motion Christmas specials of the ’60s and ’70s. Marco offers a weird riff on the lore of 12th-century explorer Marco Polo, played here lifelessly by Desi Arnaz Jr. The picture opens in the court of Mongol king Kublai Khan (Zero Mostel), and the central premise is that Marco’s father asks Khan to punish Marco for being irresponsible. Khan mischievously tasks Marco with spending a day in the king’s court, all the while begging Marco to marry one of Khan’s many daughters. Eventually Marco and his would-be betrothed venture beyond the castle to search for whale oil in a desert. Even setting aside the bizarre and episodic plot, Marco is tough to endure. Arnaz is terrible, Mostel screams most of his dialogue, and leading lady Cie Cie Win, as the butch Princess Aigarn, is charmless. (Totally wasted is the great comic actor Jack Weston, who plays Marco’s uncle and sings a dumb song about inventing spaghetti.) The production values of castle scenes are okay, but for no discernible reason, one fantasy scene is presented in the familiar Rankin-Bass style of cutesy puppets and stop-motion animation. And then there’s the issue of the songs—the awful, grating, stupid songs. Some are sickly-sweet, some are offensive with regard to gender and race, and all are interminable. Strangest of them is Aigarn’s recurring theme, “By Damn,” repurposed every time she articulates a strong emotion. Especially when she performs the song while stripping off her clothes to protest Khan’s insistence that she dress in a more feminine manner, “By Damn” does not belong in a G-rated kiddie flick. And for those who might argue that Aigarn’s characterization as a willful warrior woman is the movie’s most interesting and progressive element, watch out for the cringe-inducing way her storyline resolves. Like everything else in Marco, it’s just wrong.

Marco: LAME

Tears of Happiness (1974)

          In the ’70s, Armenian-American filmmaker Sarky Maroudian made three melodramas starring singer/actor Manuel Manankichian—and while the following remarks pertain to Tears of Happiness, which appears to be the first and most widely seen of their collaborations, one imagines that Promise of Love (1974) and Sons of Sassoun (1975), neither of which were available for review, are roughly equivalent. Tears of Happiness, which is mostly in Armenian but has a few scenes in English, is a somewhat primitive piece of work, competent but marred by iffy performances and a weak storyline. Yet bitching about anemic plotting probably misses the point, because it’s not as if anyone ever bought tickets for an Elvis picture expecting profound insights into the human condition. Like myriad other musicals designed to showcase singers, Tears of Happiness is a one-dimensional showbiz saga that follows a predictable path to a crowd-pleasing payoff, with many tuneful detours along the way.

          When the picture starts, Raffi (Manankichian) is a boorish, willful singer-songwriter who treats his young wife, Silvia (Sosi Kodjian), terribly, even striking her one night when she fails to keep their infant child quiet while he’s trying to compose a song. Silva leaves Raffi, prompting him to do some soul-searching. What happens thereafter is strictly formulaic: Without Silva’s love to ground him, Raffi finds fame but loses his integrity until realizing he’s been a fool and winning Silva back.

          An unkind review would note that Tears of Happiness often lapses into self-parody. Director Maroudian’s idea of a deep scene is to have someone cry or mope near water—a fountain, an ocean, a river—in vignettes that usually comprise only two shots, one of the actor and one of the water. This device feels particularly enervated during musical passages that drag on for several minutes. The acting is as crude and obvious as the filmmaking, so the big reunion scene (not-really-a-spoiler alert!) consists of Raffi wandering through woods and shouting Silva’s name until they somehow find each other in the wilderness. Still, Maroudian and his collaborators showed enterprise by creating specialty content for an underserved demographic, and some fans undoubtedly savor this document of Manankichian in his prime.

Tears of Happiness: FUNKY

Sammy Stops the World (1978)

          It’s tempting to wonder what sort of box-office expectations the producers of this filmed stage production had, because Sammy Stops the World radiates sensibilities associated with the mid-’60s rather than sensibilities associated with the late ’70s. Did anyone really think the public was hungry for a dated musical starring an old-fashioned entertainer? In any event, Sammy Stops the World failed to restore Sammy Davis Jr. to the big-screen popularity he enjoyed in the ’60s, and has since fallen into obscurity. Seen today, it’s perhaps best appreciated as a record of Davis’ incredible stamina, though casual fans might prefer tracking down concert footage of Davis’ familiar hits. Instead of “Candy Man” and “I Gotta Be Me,” Sammy Stops the World comprises unmemorable songs by UK tunesmiths Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, of Doctor Dolittle and Willy Wonka fame. That’s because Sammy Stops the World records a performance of Davis in the 1966 Bricusse/Newley show Stop the World—I Want to Get Off. The most famous tune to emerge from the musical is “What Kind of Fool,” not to be confused with the Barry Gibb song of the same name popularized by Barbra Streisand.

          Performing against a circus-themed backdrop and accompanied by a small cast of singers and dancers, Davis plays Littlechap, an everyman whose life journey forms a ham-fisted satire about modern existence. He gets married, takes a soul-sucking job to pay the bills, and sells out his principles for professional and social advancement, eventually becoming so adept at telling people what they want to hear that he becomes President of the United States. Periodically, Littlechap addresses the audience by exclaiming “Stop the world!” and uttering introspective asides. Eventually, the story resolves into a moral lesson because Littlechap rediscovers his integrity at a crucial moment.

          The fashionable anti-Establishment lingo of the original play was reconfigured slightly for Davis, hence some awkward references to race relations. (The performance in this film, recorded in Long Beach, California, was part of a national tour.) As a movie experience, Sammy Stops the World is underwhelming at best, exhausting at worst. Davis works his ass off, but he also mugs shamelessly and milks emotional moments—which is to say that he offers his usual shtick. And while his leather-lunged belting is physically impressive, it’s not particularly artful. Worse, the show doesn’t properly showcase his remarkable dancing. Incidentally, mention should be made of costar Marian Mercer, who plays multiple roles, since she performs the show’s cutesy dialogue and lyrics with welcome edginess.

Sammy Stops the World: FUNKY

The Magic of Lassie (1978)

The last of several films written by brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, better known as the tunesmiths of such projects as Mary Poppins (1964), family adventure The Magic of Lassie bludgeons the enduring canine franchise with cutesy songs, manipulative plotting, and the sentimental casting of beloved actors from the past. Nearly every heart-tugging cliché you can imagine is represented here, from crying children to scenes of a beautiful dog in danger. And then there are the songs. Whereas good Sherman tunes are innocent fun, bad ones—the only type on display here—are like power drills to the cerebral cortex. The mawkish plot revolves around kind-hearted geezer Clovis (James Stewart), who runs a small winery while raising his grandchildren, Chris (Michael Sharrett) and Kelly (Stephanie Zimbalist). Lassie is their pet. One day, evil businessman Jamison (Pernell Roberts) asks to buy the vineyard. Clovis refuses. Yet something about Lassie seems familiar to Jamison. Turns out that Jamison breeds champion Collies, and that Lassie a runaway from a past litter. You get the idea—Jamison seizes Lassie, heartbroken Chris leaves home to look for the dog, and Lassie escapes Jamison’s grip, beginning a perilous journey home. It’s all a prelude to the inevitable tear-filled reunions. And the scenes featuring original Sherman songs are so sickly-sweet that some viewers might experience diabetic shock. Mickey Rooney, who appears in a dumb subplot about an aging wrestler and his manager, talk-sings a couple of numbers, as does Stewart. Worse, both Debby and Pat Boone warble tunes, though neither appears onscreen.

The Magic of Lassie: LAME

Elvis (1979)

          Predictably, a TV movie dramatizing Elvis Presley’s eventful life emerged not long after the King’s August 1977 death. In February 1979, ABC broadcast Elvis, starring former Disney child star Kurt Russell and directed by, of all people, John Carpenter, whose breakthrough film Halloween (1978) had been completed but not yet released at the time he shot this gun-for-hire project. A sanitized overview of the title character’s life through 1969, when Presley completed a major comeback by returning to the live concert stage, Elvis doesn’t reveal much that casual fans don’t already know about the subject matter—Elvis was sweet on his mama, Gladys (Shelley Winters); he fell hard for a young woman named Priscilla (Season Hubley); and he gave his manager, Col. Tom Parker (Pat Hingle), too much leeway—but the story unfolds smoothly.

          Key events depicted onscreen include Elvis’ childhood fixation on his stillborn twin brother, the singer’s excitement at scoring his first recording contract, Elvis’ bumpy transition to acting, and the King’s descent into isolation and paranoia once he reached unimaginable heights of fame. Because this project treats Presley’s image gingerly, there’s no Fat Elvis excess, and a scene of the King shooting a television is about as deep as the filmmakers go into depicting Presley’s eccentricities. Despite its homogenized vibe, the movie boasts an energetic, Emmy-nominated performance by Russell, whose boyish persona captures young Elvis’ aw-shucks appeal. That Russell mostly overcomes the distraction of the dark eyeliner he wears throughout the picture—as well as the inevitable problems of imitating Elvis’ iconic sneerin’-and-struttin’ persona—speaks well to the sincerity of his work.

          Acquitting himself fairly well, Carpenter complements the project’s workmanlike storytelling with a minimalistic shooting style, and whenever he lets fly with a lengthy master shot or a slick tracking move, he does a lot to maintain the flow of his actors’ performances. Most of the time, however, one must struggle to spot signs of Carpenter’s distinctive cinematic style. That said, it’s interesting to watch Elvis and realize how quickly Carpenter and Russell locked into each other’s frequencies, because just a short time later they embarked on a great run with Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

          Incidentally, this project was a family affair for Russell, because his dad, Whit Russell, plays Elvis’ father, and Russell later married his onscreen bride, Hubley. (They divorced in 1983.) As for the film’s accuracy, Priscilla Presley reportedly vetted the script, which might be why Elvis often feels like a hero-overcomes-adversity hagiography with musical numbers. (Instead of the vocals from Presley’s original recordings, singer Ronnie McDowell’s voice is heard on the soundtrack whenever Russell lip-syncs.) FYI, a truncated version of Elvis was released theatrically overseas, though the original two-and-a-half-hour cut that was broadcast on ABC is still widely available.

Elvis: GROOVY

Cocaine Cowboys (1979)

With its strange mixture of crime, drugs, and music, Cocaine Cowboys has just enough weirdness to claim a small cult following. The picture was mostly shot in and around Andy Warhol’s beach house in Long Island, and Warhol plays himself in a few scenes. What’s more, the premise is a kick—under the leadership of a tough-guy manager, played by Jack Palance, the members of a rock band moonlight as drug smugglers. Had the filmmakers played up the connections between drugs and music, perhaps from a satirical perspective, this idea could have led somewhere. Alas, cowriter-director Ulli Lommel, who later became a prolific horror-movie hack, was not up to the task, so Cocaine Cowboys is clumsy, meandering, and shallow. At times, it’s only possible to tell characters apart based on what instrument they play or what pocket of the storyline they occupy. Briefly, the plot goes like this—after agreeing to complete one last job before ditching the drug trade forever, the band arranges for an air drop of $2 million worth of cocaine, then somehow loses the dope, triggering violent revenge from suppliers. Instead of creating tension, this set of circumstances has very little effect. The musicians hang out, record music, and shoot the breeze with Warhol, who prattles monotonously and snaps Polaroids. In the weirdest scene, one of the band’s associates woos a sexy maid into a tryst by claiming he knows the whereabouts of the cocaine, then compels the maid to service his fetish for being showered with baking powder. If you’re wondering about the title, the band (lead by real-life singer-songwriter Tom Sullivan) performs a downbeat number lamenting their status as “Cocaine Cowboys,” and some of the characters ride horses. Adventurous viewers might be able to tolerate long stretches of tedium in exchange for flashes of strangeness, but most folks will find Cocaine Cowboys irredeemably confusing and dull.

Cocaine Cowboys: LAME

1980 Week: Honeysuckle Rose

          After displaying a naturalistic screen presence in his movie debut, Sydney Pollack’s romantic drama The Electric Horseman (1978), country singer Willie Nelson was given a custom-made leading role in another romantic drama, Honeysuckle Rose, which Pollack produced but did not direct. Once again, Nelson proved he was comfortable on camera, though the role of an easygoing, pot-smoking troubadour did not require him to stretch. The film surrounding Nelson is so frustrating that the best thing to come out of this project was a classic song. “On the Road Again” became a huge crossover hit, earning a Grammy award and an Oscar nomination. Some scenes in Honeysuckle Rose capture the joy of that tune, but those bits are almost always tangential to the main plot, which is trite and unseemly. The movie also suffers for the questionable casting of its two major female roles.

          Nelson plays Buck Bonham, a longhaired Texas singer-songwriter on the verge of achieving national stardom after years of being a regional favorite. (Sound familiar?) Buck is married to sexy blonde Viv (Dyan Cannon), a former singer who gave up life on the road to raise Jamie (Joey Floyd), her son with Buck. Now firmly entrenched in middle age, she’s lost her patience with Buck’s endless declarations that “one of these days” he’ll slow down his touring to spend more time on the Bonham’s sprawling Texas ranch. When Buck’s longtime guitarist, Garland Ramsey (Slim Pickens), announces his retirement, Buck scrambles for a replacement, and Viv unwisely suggests that Buck hire Garland’s seductive 22-year-old daughter, Lily (Amy Irving). To absolutely no one’s surprise, Buck and Lily become lovers on the road, causing friction in the Bonham marriage and damaging Buck’s friendship with Garland.

          There are maybe 80 minutes of real story in Honeysuckle Rose, but the movie drags on for a full two hours. The bloat stems partially from extended performance scenes, but also from such discursions as an endless family-reunion scene and snippets of life on a tour bus. Director Jerry Schtazberg shoots all this stuff beautifully, applying a photographer’s keen eye to scenes that feel casual and spontaneous, but he can’t muster similar creativity for romantic scenes. Nelson’s low-key vibe creates an inherent energy deficiency, and the fact that neither Cannon nor Irving seem remotely believable as Texans introduces falseness into a movie that otherwise boasts plentiful authenticity. Nonetheless, Honeysuckle Rose has its pleasures. Emmylou Harris shows up to sing a number with Nelson, and it’s a treat to see Pickens playing a straight dramatic character. The scenes in which he and Nelson simulate drunken revels are particularly enjoyable.

Honeysuckle Rose: FUNKY

1980 Week: The Apple

          Highly entertaining documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) explores, in part, the cultural dissonance that resulted whenever Cannon’s founders, Israelis Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus, attempted to create movies for the international market without realizing how idiomatically they approached storytelling. As a small example of this nuance, consider a moment in the batshit-crazy musical The Apple, which Golan directed. Entering a messy apartment, a landlady exclaims: “What happened in here, a pogrom?” Or consider The Apple itself, a staggeringly wrong-headed epic using a story about the disco-era music business as an allegory for the fall of Adam and Eve from God’s grace. Yes, the apple at the heart of the story—represented, per the film’s bigger-is-better aesthetic, by a gigantic prop the size of a watermelon—is a symbol of man’s eternal sin.

          Don’t get the idea, however, that The Apple is purely high-minded, because the picture also contains one of the filthiest original songs ever composed for a motion picture. That’s how it goes with The Apple, and that’s how it went with most of the terrible movies that Golan and Globus unleashed on the world during their decades-long reign of cinematic terror. More than just bad taste, chintzy budgets, and grade-Z actors, the Cannon Films brand was synonymous with misguided storytelling. The Apple is perhaps the apex of Cannon leaving human reality behind to venture into parts unknown.

          Set in the future, the film imagines a bizarre scenario wherein a music-publishing company becomes the dominant political force in the world, controlling the economy through the popularity of its rock stars. Naturally, the head of the publishing company, Boogaloo (Vladek Sheybal), is the devil figure in this parable. His victims are the story’s Adam and Eve characters, sensitive and wholesome singer-songwriters Alphie (George Gilmour) and Bibi (Catherine Mary Stewart), who hail from the random location of Moosejaw, Canada. When the story begins, Alphie and Bibi try performing their ballad about love, “The Universal Melody,” during Univsion’s famous song contest. (In real life, the contest introduced the world to ABBA, so there’s that.) Boogaloo tampers with speakers during the duo’s performance, ensuring that his prefab band wins the contest. Then Boogaloo tempts Alphie and Bibi with the promise of a recording contract. Bibi accepts the offer—a moment dramatized by a dream sequence set in hell, complete with the aforementioned giant apple—but Alphie does not.

          Thereafter, the movie tracks Bibi’s degrading transformation into a slutty pop star. Meanwhile, Alphie mopes about the cost of integrity. Eventually, Boogaloo decrees that everyone in the world must wear a “BIM sticker,” emblematic of his publishing company’s brand name, or else risk arrest. Alphie gets pulled into Boogaloo’s seductive web, only to help Bibi escape so they can find God—excuse me, “Mr. Topps” (Joss Ackland)—hiding in a hippie commune. It’s all much weirder than it sounds, and the whole thing is presented like a bad ’70s TV special: think shiny costumes, sexualized dance numbers, and star filters. The most staggering moment involves the original song “Coming,” a tune cooed by one of Boogaloo’s acolytes—a sexy African-American chanteuse—on the occasion of luring Alphie into bed. As she writhes atop Alphie, she moans these lyrics: “Make it harder and harder and faster and faster, and when you think you can’t keep it up, I’ll take you deeper and deeper and tighter and tighter, and drain every drop of your love.”

          Is it hot in here, or is it just me?

          Golan and his collaborators employ seemingly every musical style imaginable, as if the notion of a guiding aesthetic never occurred to them; The Apple has ballet, tap, reggae, and more. Adding to the weirdness is the international cast. Stewart, appearing in her first film, is an actual Canadian who sounds like she’s from the American heartland, while Gilmour, who never appeared in another film, sounds indecipherably European. Playing the devil character is a Polish actor who sounds Israeli, and playing the God character is an English actor who sounds German. Plus, for every song that’s more or less palatable—despite its salaciousness, “Coming” is catchy—there’s a tune that punishes the eardrums. It’s best to avoid deciphering The Apple, instead letting the monumental vulgarity wash over you. If you’re a real masochist, try watching this one alongside 1980’s other misbegotten disco epics, Can’t Stop the Music and Xanadu.

The Apple: FREAKY

The Nashville Sound (1970)

          Filmed in 1969 to capture an all-star anniversary concert at the Grand Ole Opry, the storied “mother church” of country music, this serviceable documentary balances behind-the-scenes insights about the careers of wannabe stars with polished vignettes featuring established artists. Most of the picture comprises blandly shot footage of performances on the Opry stage, and there’s value in seeing vintage clips of Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, and Dolly Parton, among many others. Yet one is challenged to identify much difference between this content and, say, appearances by these folks on TV shows from the same era. About the only thing elevating the Opry scenes is the interstitial material, with performers including Bill Anderson crowding around microphones to read crass commercials. A general sense emerges of an Opry broadcast not as a pristine showcase for musical excellence but rather a commodity like any other type of mainstream entertainment. Therefore, the most interesting elements of The Nashville Sound are the moments showing B-listers trudging through humiliating spotlight gigs (as when Jeannie C. Reilly performs a new tune for a handful of listeners at a party thrown by a label executive), plus the recurring trope illustrating the arrival on the Nashville scene of new singer-songwriter Herbie Howell. 

          Among the star performers, Charley Pride stands out with his keening sustained notes during “Kaw-Liga,” Parton charms with her unvarnished performance of “Blue Ridge Mountain Home,” and Cash renders a typically rousing version of “Folsom Prison Blues.” An in-studio jam session featuring a young Charlie Daniels, among other slick players, generates the most heat, musically speaking, whereas blander performances (such as Reilly’s turn on the Opry stage with “Harper Valley P.T.A.”) quickly fade from memory. Some of the sequences of pure reportage, such as a golf tournament featuring Glen Campbell, come and go so quickly as to be meaningless—and, to be frank, the material that gets the most attention, Howell’s story, is merely okay. Although earnest, Howell is not particularly interesting as a musician or as a presence, so it’s hard to get excited about his quest for stardom. Nonetheless, the project as a whole provides an interesting snapshot of a particular industry at a particular time, in some ways very different from and in other ways very similar to the modern country-music scene.

The Nashville Sound: FUNKY

Tubby the Tuba (1975)

Based on source material held in some esteem (more on that later), Tubby the Tuba is among the lesser animated features released during the ’70s, so even though the story is a harmless morality tale extolling worthy virtues, the experience of watching the picture is quite tedious. Dick Van Dyke provides the voice for the title character, an overweight brass instrument depressed that all he does is provide repetitive “oompah-oompah” rhythms. One day, he breaks from his orchestra in search of a melody to play. Yet Tubby gets sidetracked when he takes a job at a circus, delivering pails of water to thirsty elephants. One of the pachyderms, Mrs. Elephant (Pearl Bailey), asks for a demonstration of Tubby’s musical skills and rejoices in what she hears. (“That oompah turns me on!”) This leads to Tubby becoming a star attraction at the circus, which in turn causes Tubby to become an insufferable diva. Will our hero regain his humility? Will he find a melody to play? As Tubby the Tuba follows the blandest possible children’s-entertainment patterns, the answers to these questions should be painfully obvious. Tubby’s story originated as a narrated classical-music piece in the 1940s, and it was first animated, via stop-motion, for an Oscar-nominated 1947 short film. The expansion of the piece to feature length did not serve poor Tubby well. Even with Van Dyke valiantly striving to inject his characterization with pathos, the narrative is enervated and predictable and stupid, with the material added to flesh out the running time coming across as pure filler. By the time Tubby meets an underappreciated singing frog, the filmmakers seem absolutely desperate to compensate for the limitations of their one-dimensional leading character. Putting this sort of thing over requires magic, but Tubby the Tuba is never more than mundane. One might even say it’s oompathetic.

Tubby the Tuba: LAME

Medicine Ball Caravan (1971)

          Watching the hippie-era documentary Medicine Ball Caravan, it’s plain that Warner Bros. threw a bunch of money at the project, elaborately filming a counterculture group’s colorful trek from San Francisco to the heartland, then enlisting Martin Scorsese, credited as the film’s executive producer and post-production supervisor, to jazz up the footage with creative editing and ironic musical counterpoints. Yet all the bells and whistles in the world aren’t enough to make this film anything more than a tacky attempt at exploiting the popularity of Ken Kesey’s “magic trip” escapades of the ’60s, which were documented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 nonfiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Since no feature-length film emerged from Kesey’s exploits, the plan at Warner Bros. must have been to point cameras at the next group of drugged-out adventurers departing from the Bay Area for parts unknown. Unfortunately, hoping that documentarians will capture something important is not the same as actually capturing something important. Notwithstanding some decent musical performances, by random acts including Alice Cooper and B.B. King, Medicine Ball Caravan is a forgettable slice of Woodstock-era life.

          Comprising about 150 people in more than a dozen vehicles, the titular caravan traveled to various cities over the course of 21 days, ostensibly to spread the peace-and-love ethos. Concerts were staged in various cities to draw locals, and the hope, one assumes, was to create educational encounters between hippies and straights. A few such interactions happen, as when the film’s French-born director, François Reichenbach, chats up an old cowboy who says he digs the hippies’ rebel spirit. Showing a flair for the overdramatic, Reichenbach then gushes, “You’re the most wonderful man I ever met!” Pleasant as it is to see a cosmopolitan artist leave his bubble, moments like this one don’t resonate, especially since Reichenbach (and/or Scorsese) devotes so much screen time to nonsense. In one scene, a guy whacked out on dope spews motor-mouthed gibberish, and in another, longhaired dudes—as well as Reichenbach’s camera—ogle hippie chicks while they take a group shower. Editing gimmicks including split-screen imagery do little to enliven the material.

          Still, it’s not as if Medicine Ball Caravan—sometimes known as We Have Come for Your Daughters—is a total waste. As one of the caravan participants says, “Half of this is groovy and half of it is rotten—we’ll groove on the groovy part of it and try to make the rotten part better.” Fair enough.

Medicine Ball Caravan: FUNKY

Celebration at Big Sur (1971)

          Something of a footnote to Woodstock (1970), the classic documentary immortalizing the most famous musical happening of the ’60s, Celebration at Big Sur was filmed just weeks after the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival, but it wasn’t released theatrically until almost two years later. Featuring several artists who also performed at Woodstock—plus a notable performer who did not, Joni Mitchell—Celebration at Big Sur is choppy and inconsistent, with interrupted songs, truncated versions of artists’ sets, and lots of peripheral nonsense comprising the picture’s brisk 83-minute running time. Despite a few musical highlights, the most interesting stretch of the picture involves vituperative Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young member Stephen Stills brawling with an obnoxious heckler. After the fight, Stills gets onstage and says how grateful he is that “some guys were there to love me out of it,” then adds, in words that seem like a parody of flower-child parlance, “We gotta just let it be, because it all will be how it’s gonna.” Whatever it takes to keep the vibe going, man. As for those musical highlights, Joan Baez delivers her usual professional renderings of tunes including “Sir Galahad,” Mitchell offers an ornate reading of “Woodstock,” CSNY churns through (part of) “Down by the River,” and Mitchell teams with David Crosby, Graham Nash, John Sebastian, and Stills for a zesty version of “Get Together.” Woodstock Lite, to be sure, but pleasant enough.

           Regarding this project’s backstory, from 1964 to 1971, the Big Sur Folk Festival was held on the grounds of the mind-expanding Esalen Institute, located on a scenic bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The performances in Celebration at Big Sur were filmed in 1969. Hollywood comedy writer Carl Gottleib produced the picture, but he failed to provide a guiding aesthetic or theme—random vignettes capture everything from a pointless conversation with a local cop to shots of Crosby and Stills taking a nude sauna with other longhairs. One can’t help but get the sense of West Coast progressives desperately trying to get in on the Yasgur’s Farm action, even though the Big Sur event seems antiseptic and exclusive by comparison to Woodstock. And by the time the filmmakers try to jazz up the style of the picture with solarized double exposures while Mitchell adds a yodeling freakout to the end of “Woodstock,” the grasping for cultural relevance becomes almost painfully desperate. Celebration at Big Sur captures a moment, but other films—including not just Woodstock but also Monterey Pop (1968)—capture almost exactly the same moment much more effectively.

Celebration at Big Sur: FUNKY

The Punk Rock Movie (1978)

          An impressive historical artifact created by a DJ who happened to be in the right place at the right time, lo-fi documentary The Punk Rock Movie captures vintage performances from several of the most important British acts to emerge during the original punk-rock era. The Clash, Generation X (with Billy Idol fronting), the Sex Pistols, and Siouxsie and the Banshees are among the groups on display, mostly in performance footage but also, occasionally, in candid clips. Anyone looking for you-are-there reportage of what it felt like to catch seminal acts at the Roxy, a London club that presented punk music exclusively for several months, will devour The Punk Rock Movie. From the pierced and tattooed kids bopping around the dancefloor to the attitudinal musicians screeching onstage, the punk scene is depicted in all its ugly glory. As for the question of whether anyone who isn’t predisposed toward punk might dig watching this flick, an easy test is the scene featuring the group Eater tossing a pig’s head onstage, chopping up the head with cleavers, and then tossing the pieces into the audience. To be fair, that’s as extreme as the movie gets, but it says something about the youthful extremes of old-school punk. Sometimes these brash sounds conveyed political rage, as when the Sex Pistols satirized the British monarchy with “God Save the Queen,” and sometimes they represented little more than kids being obnoxious.

          In any event, the story behind the picture is that Don Letts, a DJ at the Roxy, used a Super-8 camera to record bands and audiences during the club’s punk period. His access was as remarkable as the litany of groups he got on camera, though the actual music is very much a matter of taste. Some acts who later adopted slicker styles, notably Siouxsie and the Banshees, appear here in fairly rough early incarnations, whereas famous short-lived acts, especially the Sex Pistols, operate at the height of their powers. Letts’ filming style is competent but ordinary—being limited to one camera prohibited him from covering any single performance with multiple angles. Still, he mostly trains his eye on the most interesting things onstage, so it’s a kick to see Mick Jones and Joe Strummer of the Clash pounding out “White Riot,” or to see a pre-MTV Billy Idol howling “Walking in the City” with Generation X. FYI, the Pistols’ performance—their first with infamous bassist Sid Vicous—was the only set shot outside the Roxy, because Letts caught the band at a London movie theater. More trivia: In the U.S., this picture was released as The Punk Rock Movie from England.

The Punk Rock Movie: FUNKY

1980 Week: No Nukes

          In the wake of the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, a gaggle of politically active rock stars formed Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE), then presented several massive concerts in the New York City area under the “No Nukes” banner. Beyond the core group, which includes Jackson Browne, John Hall, Graham Nash, and Bonnie Raitt—all of whom have continued to perform anti-nuclear-energy concerts well into the 2010s—the original wave of “No Nukes” concerts gathered luminaries including the Doobie Brothers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and James Taylor. Highlights from various 1979 concerts were released in 1980 as a concert movie and as a live album, though the roster of artists and songs varies wildly between the film and the LP. Speaking only about the film, No Nukes is more effective as a musical experience than it is as a political experience, but that’s the cost of leveraging celebrity participation to raise awareness of social issues.

          In fact, one of the sharpest moments in No Nukes occurs during a brisk opening montage of fans heading into Madison Square Garden for one of the concerts, because someone cynically observes that most people are there for the tunes instead of the cause. It speaks well of the filmmakers and the MUSE team in general that this clip was included, because it reflects the artists’ awareness that building a grassroots movement requires overcoming deeply entrenched apathy. Indeed, it’s perhaps too easy to watch No Nukes today and gloss over the reason the musicians gathered. Even though the movie features impassioned remarks from famed crusader Ralph Nader and a short film-within-a-film about the danger of nuclear energy that was shown to audiences at the Madison Square Garden shows, and even though deeply committed musicians Hall and Nash perform earnest tunes about “atomic poison” and the like, purely musical passages command the viewer’s attention.

          Much of the hype around the time of No Nukes’ release concerned Springsteen’s mini-set of three songs, since No Nukes was the first time the E Street Band’s already-legendary live act was shown in movie theaters. The Boss kills it with “Thunder Road” and one of the first live performances of “The River.” By comparison, the Doobie Brothers’ proficient readings of “Takin’ It to the Streets” and “What a Fool Believes” seem ordinary, and even Browne’s fierce version of “Running on Empty” fails to match the fire of Springsteen’s performance. That said, any concert movie that contains Crosby, Stills & Nash harmonizing on “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” Raitt ripping through her version of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” and Taylor channeling his inner bluesman on “Your Smiling Face” is doing something right. One could quibble with the structure of the picture, since the shift from the shadowy intimacy of the Madison Square Garden shows to the sunlit sprawl of a Battery Park concert that drew 200,000 attendees is abrupt. What’s beyond reproach, however, is the generosity of the musicians, the importance of the cause, and the wonder of watching people unite beneath the banner of making the world a safer place.

No Nukes: GROOVY